Review: 1491, Charles C. Mann

Having more than a passing interest in history this book jumped out at me as part of a peruse of the interweb. Meso-American and Andean cultures seem to be something many people are interested in, but finding books that move past the usual tropes are hard to find.

Mann really lifts the game in relation to enabling greater understanding of what the Americas were like before European intrusion, primarily by addressing the greater myths and demolishing them in order. The concern with this type of book is that the mythbusting can sometimes stray far too close to explanations that end in “because aliens”. For example, “how could nomadic, semi-conscious tribes build the step pyramids?” Answer – aliens did it.

1491 uses the latest research to demonstrate that the Americas were home to a succession of advanced urban civilisations, demolishes the “population by land-bridge” argument, undermines the “Western wilderness” fallacy, and brings a detailed, but not obsessively undue amount of attention to the scale and number of cultures displaced by Europeans.